What Phill needs for breakfast.

Get it down you with a greasy egg sarnie!

A bit of a roof.

One side nearly done.  I made the mistake of pre-cutting the wood on the level floor and then wondered why it just would not fit up there.  Turns out the roof is skewed and the old wood was just wangled in by eye.

The old super-thin slates were turning to compost in our hands so it was a devil of a job to get the old and new to fit together.  The new wood was also a bit thicker so there is a wee bump where the join is, and the line of slate hooks looks a bit wobbly.  Still, not too bad for a first attempt, but I wish we'd been able to spend longer measuring.  Was chucking it down though, so a waterproof roof is better than half a roof neatly done and a wet bedroom!

Nice tight scarfing over the supports.  All oak.

I had to use Spanish slate in the end as no-one produces Breton slate any more.  Pity - the older buildings around here have it and it looks fine to me!

Oak and thick hard slate and stainless steel fixings = a repair job in 200 years or so.

Wood, oil, dust. Beer.

 Bit of elbow grease and some hot linseed oil makes teak look like teak again.

Absolutely no need for anything else.  Except maybe tung oil.

 Table took all day to scrub, brush, sand and oil.

Practising whittling combs for a prezzie for someone.

Done with this knife.

K's been very busy preparing the walls for pointing.  Looks good! 

 I've been finishing getting rid of the render I couldn't reach until the bread oven had been removed.

New vent for the larder - lime and stone, no PVC in sight.

Going to be covered in a brass sliding vent after the render's been put on.

 Champion of England peas in a fancy zig-zag to make a long row fit a short bed.

Runners sown but not showing yet... 

 Balti chickens looking like chickens...

 Toms taking off in the tunnel.  Pachypodium happy.

 Soft fruit a bit annoying - we've just found a layer of compacted hardcore and clay under the rasps from an old pig yard!  No wonder they were unhappy.

Better drown my sorrows in the best beer I've ever made.

8%, rich and malty with great Fuggles and Goldings finish.

Huzzah!

Don't talk the talk...

...if you can't walk the walk.
Phoney builders are outlined in chaux.

One for the Wu-tan fans out there.  Apologies for any music fans also, but hip-hop is not my fault.

Been preparing the walls for rendering, known as dubbing out.  Being hot and dry with very thirsty walls, the lime mortar I put in the bigger holes in the walls has fallen out again.  Wrong sand, maybe.  Also too dry.  Dunno.  It's Another Skill to Learn: back in The Day mortar mixing was a trade like masonry.  The mortar bods would travel the continent making cathedrals out of local sands and limes and had to know their stuff - the evidence that they did is all around.  Me, I'd have been sacked on the first day of building, and probably excommunicated!

Too bloody hot!

House renovation progress.

I've been reading some interesting (for me) books and on-line articles about proper building.  Basically, everything you need for a beautiful, healthy, long-lasting building has been thought out and developed hundreds and sometimes thousands of years previously.  Every place on earth has the prefect materials for a decent home.  Here we have oak, slate, stone and earth.  In other places you have bamboo, teak, clay, lime.  It is all just there, out of the window (ok, no windows out there, but you get the idea).  Anything else is generally ugly, polluting and temporary.  I might expand on this later, when I've taken some photos of buildings around here to illustrate my point.

So, I am renovating our house and am trying to use as much locally sourced material as possible, and am recycling as much as I can in a wee journey of discovery of old methods and materials.

So far I've stripped the cement render off.  I needed an SDS drill for this as the render was almost pure cement and very, very hard.  Renders are there to protect the wall, and act as a sacrificial coating - it wears away so the structure doesn't.  On a rubble stone house with earth mortar with no foundations, movement is inevitable as the soil expands and shrinks during the year.  It's fine.  Cement doesn't move though - it is very strong, impervious and resists movement up to it's breaking point, when it just cracks.  Cracks let in water which then can't get out again.  This equals a cold, damp house.  Cement is great for railway bridge footings, anti-tank emplacements and other grim uses.  This is what it was developed for.  Not for use on houses.

The original stonework is very well put together.  It is basically rubble from the fields bedded with clay sub-soil (mortar is there to spread the load of the stone on top so it doesn't crack - soil is good for this as long as it doesn't wash away), joined very closely like a jigsaw where non of the pieces fit properly and you still have to make a picture.  As you can see, there was a window put in later in the house's history (you can see a rectangular hole to the right of the window which is where the original fireplace wooden beam was - the other was removed for the window to go in) - compare the stonework above it with the original.  De-skilling of society is another rant!

On the other side of the house, we've got the electric coming in and access above the boiler room was difficult so instead of being electrocuted I removed the render in line with the drainpipe to hide the join when the house is re-rendered in haired lime.

Bread oven also gone!  This was going to make way for a new window as we were going to move the bathroom to the lighter, warmer side of the house but the drainage won't work.  Again, look at the white rectangle and the stonework there.  This was a door into the larder, and will be again.  It was just bricked up with concrete blocks and the other side is black with mould.  Not for long though.

Where did the oven go?

Into the hangar!  Two 1m cubed bags of earth mortar and about 4m cubed of very heavy stone, plus a ton of fire-bricks, slate and oak will be made into a workshop floor and a pizza oven in the garden at some point.

Next is repairing and plugging holes, making doorways, vents for larder, re-pointing the front.  Then we're replacing the gable end roof wood (rotten because painted over badly), re-flashing the chimney, re-slating a bit, demolishing the bread oven chimney, then rendering the walls (3 coats plus lime-wash)!

Makes me tired just thinking about it!  Good fun though!

May update

Been busy!  

 Polytunnel is a very good place for 2m high broad beans, which we've been eating since April.

 Nice and neat with tall pea frame looking nice, but it's been too cold and nothing's germinated!

August's barbecue sorted: 12 Coucou de Rennes, eating a sack of feed a week and they're only 5 weeks old! 

New cockerel.  What a bobby dazzler.  Ladies hate him because he jumps on them when they're eating.

Blog a bit sparse for now.

My camera battery is shot so no piccies and I am getting a bit repetitive, so there will now be a short blog break.

We're not skiving!  What we are doing is:

Stripping render off wall (inside and out), re-rendering with lime and hemp.
Moving bathroom to other end of house.
Enlarging living room.
Re-doing kitchen and putting a wood cooker in.
Planning a conservatory (proper timber frame).
Endlessly double digging (got 8 beds done now!)
Planting, sowing, and watering.
Getting meat chickens and maybe geese.
Building a workshop out of totally recycled materials and general junk.  With an earth floor.  And no electricity.  With hand tools.
Watering our very much alive (woo-hoo!) hedges and trees we planted in winter.
Setting up a drip irrigation system with two 1000 litre water tanks for Extra Big Tomatoes.
Brewing, baking, and generally grafting hard, feeling very much alive and loving it.